getting credit?" "Oh, there are so many." I said, "Oh, yeah? Who
A -
are they?" [laughter] So go to the local area, talk the extension

worker, say, "How m&M-" y o:ZCow. "There're so many." "Well,

-what are their names?" And sitting there with the lists of all

the names, hundreds of names, and going through them one by one

and making a column and checking off whether they were male or

female.

R: Wow. Yes.

S: And then we found out there were 3 out of 150,...

[laughter] who were female. Yes, "there were so many". And I

said, "Ah-hah! In order to change the situation, we have to know

exactly how many there are."

R: Yes.

S: created these formats, taught people how to do it. They

collected the data, because, ~geaRi, there's no way I could do

that for the whole country. And the names didn't mean anything to

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me. I1eC, I couldn't tell whether they were males or females,-.-

e na n...I= E ?~c-Om,- ,- So we collected our

data a4i-f-n -ay .-- -may-in the three sites, three locations,

maybe more. And it was something like 5 percent for the whole

country. And so I said, "Well, u4;F-l This is not very good."

R: Yes.

S: And I found out the whole mechanism by which women

could or could not be members of farmers' groups to get the

credit and what was political ngg terms of group formation

and networking and all those good things.

R: Yes.

S: So I had that kind of ethnographic data...

R: Yes. And how did you do that? Did you train people to

collect the data?

S: _.I did that.JtI talked to people.6 -that stuff I

did a lot myself, because I wouldn't have trusted other people's

opinions on it. Iseg-, I had a million opinions. But I really...

I talked to people; asked them myself on that kind of stuff.

R: Yes.

S: So then I said, "Ah-hah! What I'm going to do is I'm

going to write a technical circular." I had been using all their

technical circulars, like, How to Grow Soybeans. Those were my

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first! [laughter]

R: Yes.

S: I.. like Gladys#, I was brushing up ,

yes-g how to do these things. So I said, "I'm going to write

a technical circular." And the technical circulars were always of

thbek> .-te r-e kindcf.zf .r1, how to control some kind

of plant disease. Or how to increase the yield of such and such.

But that was the nature of them, and I had a whole series of

them. Arrd=ER I had them here, because I had to pull them

out the other day [gets circular out to show]. But that was the

one I wrote.

R: Reaching Female Farmers through Male Extension Workers.

S: Reaching Female Farmers through Male Extension Workers.

R: Yes. Yes.

S: OK. And that was the first, how shall we say, social

science technical circular [laughter] in the country of Malawi.

And its publication was announced in the newspaper, and it was

distributed to every extension worker in the country. And the

photographs are their photographs, not mine. And the content

was... it took a long time to kind of get that through. And

people wanted to... especially the mid-range people, because that

was a huge policy thing. And I finally had to go to the top, the

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deputy minis~ ior whatever... principal secretary to get it

approved. And he was very supportive of it.

R: I love the back.... It's a good picture.

S: Yes. The woman who.... That was an award for good

farmers. Well, yo-kno we could find women in every category.

Jtei,;a here's a picture of women and plowing in there. That was

their photograph. I combed their archives in terms photos. They

had a huge photographic library. And I thought, y -kw, "I'm

definitely going to use their stuff, not mine," in terms of

photographs.

But that particular document then went out everywhere. So

that was the first thing. S.c-eld 'tT ause-i- ..

Let me just say one more word about that.

R: Yes.

S: I realized early on that the only way to get something

done in a hierarchical system was to have people at the top tell

people to do it. And the people at the top oa 1.....BS could

take risks; they could be innovative. They could do things that

were being done elsewhere that were, -'Ems, the new things.

People in the middle were terrified, because they were squeezed,

y~-~i a from the top and they could not take decisions of an

independent nature.

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Anita Spring

Anita Spring

R: Yes.

S: And they were very much afraid of rocking the boat. I'm

always terrified to deal with middle-range people myself, at the

present time as result of this, because they are true

gatekeepers.

R: Right. If they're let... right.

S: And they are so terrified. People at the lowest levels

certainly can't do anything like that, but they can tell you why.

They can say, "Well, that's not my job," or, "I only do A, B, and

C." And so they're very clear as to why they can't do it. They

know. Whereas people in the middle, whb.eA- they'll make

you believe that they're important, and yet they can't make those

kinds of decisions, and they're terrified of change.

R: Yes.

S: So I was beginning to understand that process, which

I think is extremely important in interventions and development

work and probably a large portion of why people in many parts of

the world... and I never thought of this in relation to the

Washoe, but I think we could probably run through that and come

up with some interesting conclusions.

R: Yes.

S: You know, things have been sort of messed up and it's

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Anita Spring

very easy to kind of maintain messed-up programs and policies,

because the people who are actually the mid-range people who are

running them are terrified of change, and the low-level are just

carrying them out or just carrying out orders and so forth.

Well, anyway, to make a long story short I was also in the

Ministry of Agriculture one day when they were designing the new

handbook for extension and evaluation personnel on the credit

program. And this is really a peculiar story. I said, "Do you

have a ruler and a pencil?" Talk about high-tech. And I said, "I
lJrct^ fkS -t-ks
have great idea. Let's just...." This was the final copy or
A
something, the penultimate copy. So A--tek I just drew lines

down the pages, disaggregated it by gender there and on the

summary page, and, therefore, the entire data collection system

for the entire country was gender-disaggregated from the very

beginning when that new thing came out.

R: Yes. Yes.

S: So we put that together with the fact that it was

important to get women into the programs. And here was the method

and mechanism for doing so.

R: Yes.

S: And it was going to be monitored and counted on these

national reporting formats, and it was an import?4 awoen,) 4

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Anita Spring

everyone knew women didn't default on their loans. They were the

best at repaying. It's just that nobody wanted to go talk to

them, because they could be accused, or, vgjaa, they didn't

think it was important, or they had so many, yji -eh three of

them or something. W&=7 m-a-de.cae.. -the'i cTm,, _tL

R: And because... for the tape, I just need to clarify

that the extension publication on reaching female farmers was the

mechanism to deliver the innovation of reaching women.

S: Right.

R: Yes.

S: Several innovations. It was a mechanism to deliver

credit, in-kind inputs, technical assistance, and~Jftes.mad one

other thing should be mentioned: if the female extension agents

had been trained in agriculture, they could have done it.

R: Yes.

S: They weren't.

R: Yes.

S: If they had been connected to the credit system, they

could have done it, but they weren't connected. They never gave

out credit. And if there had been a critical mass of them, they

could have done it. But there were only at that point about

200... 150, 200 female extension agents for the entire country.

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Anita Spring

R: Yes.

S: Poorly trained, not connected to credit, and not doing

agriculture, in spite of the fact that they were in the Ministry

of Agriculture. [laughter]

R: Yes.

S: Whereas there were twenty-one hundred [2,100] male

extension workers,-whose job it was to give out credit and

provide agricultural input and technical assistance to farmers.

Well, it had all mostly been male farmers up until that point. So

there was no way to rely on the female staff, but at the same

time, they had to be recapacitated.... That's why I had to work

on their curriculum and upgrading that.

R: Yes. Yes.

S: They were not particularly interested.

R: I was going to ask you....

S: Yes. That was a big problem.

R: Yes. Yes.

S: So they had to be motivated to be interested. -~t om

bgae,- yjH=hagy ey had to be focused on farming and rather

than knitting.
A

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Anita Spring

P: Right.

[At this point this recording becomes muffled and distorted for

some reason and is difficult to understand.--L.S.][Anita: I have

filled in as best I can but this is the tape that we had so much 0

trouble with can you fill in blanks as best you can? -Penny]

R: Yes, they were recruited to do the knitting.

S: Yes. And liked it, many of them. And also, just the

numbers of them...there were very few, b~_egmpaisLMg~ of them for

the whole country

S:- And very scattered and spread out.

R: Yes.

S: I mean, sure most extension did not reach the majority

of farmers, but the fact that cauld only lgethe male farmers,(Ct" L-

C,' obviously, aggravated the problem [laughter]

R: Yes.

S: So that's why the whole methodo14' the realization was

that it was OK for male extension workerslto lso deal with

female clientele, and there were mechanisms for these things, for

working with groups, making decisions, for getting the headman to

call together, to call women in the area either as individuals or

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Anita Spring

in groups, et cetera, et cetera.

R: And t s w that's also another part of how your

ethnographic and anthropological expertise contributed...

S: Absolutely. I had the ability to analyze the mechanisms

that were in place and to find out what worked and what didn't. I

found out, guess what? In some places male extension workers

worked out quite well already-this is before the whole thing

started--with the female farmers. How did they do it? So let's

find out how they did it, OK? I observed, I talked to people at

all levels. "How is it that you connected with, you connected

with three?"

R: Right.

S: "Well who are those three?" y.ggJpw- And then, "What

to you do with them? Are there any problems? What are the

problems?" I came at this, yekn with data of what worked

based on real life situations. And that's what I used to build a

model so that other people could use. -

R: Right.

S: Because I knew it was happening in some places. So this

went out to everybody, and... s3=m.r, I left Malawi

s r] I V t came back for a 170J &,- I ____

a-c p -i ,nd then came back in 1990 __ ____ in
-

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the process q1 / i brother projects?

R: Yes.

S: And I made a point of finding out what had happened to
ikers I
the credited particularly. They went from five women
A /,
participating to 35 percent of the creditors, and making credit

available to 175,000 women rv 7i< cY~C^ c

R: Wow.

S: The interesting comparison is that women's programs...

I almost had women's programs totally plugged into mainstream

activities.

R: Yes.

S: And in the second round of project A-i s

yeIJniversity of Florida lost the contract,...

S: because the men in the College of Agriculture did

not think gender issues important.,, They did not even think

that the farming system r-e- c0^ the highest cz e=p3d.~aein $
A
QA asB. They were so focused on r v\ nO Or\C t n _t n

.. --'j those kinds of things, they omitted the

systems approach, they omitted the gender approach. And Oregon

State and the consortium it was associated with got the project.
acn- alcs he Cl 'o i/ C I-or
And also, the College of Agriculture... es, I have always
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Anita Spring

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Anita Spring 7-23

been in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and so...--ad
ruz S eG
so they avoided.... To make a long story short,- i '-w-aei I
A
swear, ten minutes after the Oregon State... [laughter]... got
c'-Iec VVw-Q
the contract, that they... I mean, the next day they called me